After a year online the free speech-focused instance ‘Burggit’ is shutting down. Among other motivations, the admins point to grievances with the Lemmy software as one of the main reasons for shutting down the instance. In a first post asking about migrating to Sharkey, one of the admins states:
This Lemmy instance is much harder to maintain due to the fact that I can’t tell what images get uploaded here, which means anyone can use this as a free image host for illegal shit, and the fact that there’s no user list that I can easily see. Moderation tools are nonexistent on here. It also eats up storage like crazy due to the fact that it rapidly caches images from scraped URLs and the few remaining instances that we still federate with. The software is downright frustrating to work with, and It feels less rewarding overall putting effort into this instance because it feels like we’re so isolated.
A few weeks later, in the post announcing that Burggit was shutting down, another admin says the same:
The amount of hoops that burger has to go to in order to bring you this site is ridiculous. To give you an idea of how bad this software is, there’s no easy way to check all the images uploaded to the site (such as through private messages). When the obvious concern of potential illegal imagery is brought up to lemmy devs, they shrug and say to plug in an expensive AI image checker to scan for illegal imagery. That response genuinely has me thinking that this is by design, and they want it to be like this. We can’t even easily look at the list of registered users without looking through the DB, absolute insanity.
The other thing is there’s no real way to manage storage properly in Lemmy, the storage caches every image ever uploaded to any instance forever.
Also the software is constantly breaking.
They also say that Kbin has many of the same problems, so I’m just curious to know if the admins of bigger Lemmy & Kbin instances feel the same way about these software.
Lemmy is heavier on the cpu than for example mastodon or matrix are but a lot less on the harddrive. Its insane. I use matrix the most, then lemmy, then mastodon. Still, mastodon sucks hdd like crazy, matrix as well. Only lemmy is easy on the hdd.
Of course I‘m running private instances. You can never know why public instances go bonkers. Maybe someone is abusing it for other things.
Anyway, lemmy does have some moderation tools but I agree. They need work. You have to know a lot about linux, databases and have to figure out a lot of stuff if you have problems with lemmy. Thats not okay.
But as always with foss. If you run a public instance, you should accept donations and if they dont cover the costs so you can pay someone to make a fork for you that has what you need, you might be doing something wrong.
It would be interesting to investigate why Lemmy has high CPU usage. In principle it should be quite efficient as its written in Rust. Its also not doing anything particularly performance intensive, unless you are subscribed to lots of communities or have lots of users.
From other comments I read, the database seems to be the issue, not lemmy. Is uses postgres and that uses the resources. Lemmy itself is no problem.
I suppose there is still room for database optimization then, but its hard to find people who know how to do this.
Ain’t that the truth! I struggle for the same reason on the AI Horde ;_;